This project measures the background radiation outside the house, and transmits it to a display station inside the house. The outside sensing unit is solar powered (but it doesn’t have to be), and should have a range of at least 50m. The display station inside the house continuously displays the current background, and logs it to an SD card (along with date / time, temperature and other data). Daily high counts and other information are also displayed.
This page describes the final form of this project. If you are interested in the prototypes that led up to – perhaps to build your own using off the shelf components and the Geiger Kit – check out the Project Evolution page.
There is also a page for The 2.4GHz Version of this project. After a lot of time and energy, I’ve concluded that 433MHz version works better for my needs. You can check out the summary at the bottom of that page for the reasons.
This is not an “official product”, however I do have the PCB boards mentioned here and the parts. If you are interested in a kit, let me know. But please understand that it’s really the sharing of a personal project and it will take ingenuity on your part to have it come together the way you want. I am happy to assist though.
The Outside Sensing Unit
The sensing unit is the Geiger Kit running at 3.3V, interfaced to an RFM22B transceiver via SPI. It’s powered by a solar cell and Adafruit Solar Charger that keeps a 2700mAh LiPo battery charged.
With the UC_PWR jumper on the Geiger Kit removed. This separates the Vcc that powers the Geiger HV circuit from the ATmega328. This allows the sketch to control the power to the Geiger circuit from an I/O pin. Using the Geiger circuit only when needed saves power.
Read More: Wireless Monitoring Geiger Station